Avoid Unwelcome Firewood “Friends”

Just a short note of caution here - If you don't like little creatures crawling around the house and you don't want to have to worry about what they might be doing TO your house, it's best not to leave fresh firewood sitting around.

Occasionally, insects that could potentially damage wood are brought into homes.Sometimes these insects are infesting wooden objects or building materials. Most times, they will only cause a nuisance since conditions in your home are too dry, or the available wood is the wrong sort for these insects to re-infest. But under some conditions, some insects introduced into your home can infest and damage other wood.

You'll want to be careful what you bring in. Be aware of how wood has been treated and stored before you bring it in. This fact sheet from Penn State offers some information and suggestions for avoiding and controlling a group of wood-infesting insects called powderpost beetles:

But many winter insect “infestations” arise simply because someone brought in some firewood for later. Overwintering insects and other small creatures can become active if they are brought into your warm home.

Who needs the nuisance? Who needs the worry? Avoid this problem by only bringing inside the firewood you plan to burn right away.

Training Young Trees

Most of us have a picture in our head of what an ornamental deciduous tree is supposed to be. For many of us, that means a tree with a straight trunk, with branches placed high enough so we don't hit them with our head when we're mowing the lawn or walking on the sidewalk. We want those branches to be well spaced, and for the tree to have an overall pleasing shape. We also want the tree to be healthy and safe.

We start to achieve these goals by choosing a species of tree with the shape and characteristics we want in our landscape. We choose a tree that will do well in the soil and light conditions on the property. We choose a well-formed, properly grown young tree at the nursery or garden center. We plant it right.

But don't forget the next step. Your young tree needs to be trained. Pruning a young tree is done with purpose and planning to help the tree develop into a healthy, pleasing-looking mature speciman which won't interfere with walkways, buildings etc. Pruning a tree properly when it is young can prevent its needing major pruning as it gets older.

For information on how to do this, one of the first places to consult might be Penn State's Pruning Guide for Ornamental Trees:

Consider These Lawn Alternatives Using Native Plants

In some situations, grass or lawns can be a maintenance burden or difficult to grow. Troublesome areas can include steep slopes, wet or shady areas, and highly erodible areas. In these cases, alternatives could be considered. When selected carefully, lawn alternatives improve infiltration of water into the soil, slow runoff, and reduce maintenance.

Lawn alternatives that you may consider include:

- Groundcovers that require very little maintenance and work well in hard to reach areas.

- Water or rain gardens that can create interesting sound and texture additions to your landscape.

Landscaping that incorporates native, perennial plants (plants that are generally defined as occurring in North America before European settlement) can be especially beneficial. Native plants have evolved to local conditions over thousands of years and form an integral part in the life cycles of the local wildlife. In addition, native plants are generally hardier than other ornamental plants because they have adapted to their locales over a long period of time. They are most likely to survive extreme weather conditions and generally require less maintenance, pesticides, and fertilizers than other ornamental plants.

Try These Winter Gardening Activities With the Kids!

Here are some great ideas for childrens' activities from one of our Master Gardeners, Kate Brandes:

My son is two and I struggle to keep him entertained in the winter while it's too cold to go outside. I've recently been looking into some indoor gardening activities that I'm going to try. These look like they'll be a lot of fun for the little ones or for the kid in you:

Eggheads: Boil some eggs and carefully crack and save the lower two-thirds of the shell. Draw a mouth, eyes, and nose on the shell and fill with potting soil. Sprinkle some grass seed (rye works well) and gently press the seeds into the soil and water. The sprouts become the hair and can be clipped with scissors or grown long for a shaggy look.

Sponge Garden - Sow leaf lettuce seeds in the holes of a moist sponge and keep the sponge moist in a shallow pan placed in a well-lit area. The plants will form masses of foliage.

Get a Head Start - Get kids involved in starting some plants indoors for your summer garden. Consider trying tomatoes, peppers, or eggplant, all of which require a long, warm growing season for the best production.

Bird Seed Surprise - Involve your little one in feeding the birds this winter. In the summer you could grow some sunflower seeds with your child to stock up for next winter.

Ice Storm Damages Trees

We had quite an ice storm last night! When I got up this morning, a big cherry tree had come down over our driveway and we had to get the chain saw out to remove it. Our big white birch was also weighted down by the ice. The top of the tree was laying on the ground. On my way to work I saw a lot of trees damaged by the storm.

The first thing to consider in this situation is safety. Avoid venturing out into a woodlot as ice is building, if it is windy, or when the ice is melting and falling off. Be alert for large leaning trees and branches. Keep in mind that broken branches that hang up in other trees can be especially dangerous.

The next thing to do is wait until the ice melts. Sometimes when the weight of the ice is removed, bent over trees stand back up again. If you try to break the ice off the tree, you might break branches and do more damage than good.

After the ice has melted, you'll need to decide which trees will need extra attention. Prune any broken branches, using proper pruning cuts. If you have big trees that suffered damage, I'd recommend you call a certified arborist to assess the situation. Large trees are very heavy and can become structurally unstable if major branches break out of one side. Large branches and trees can move unpredictably when inexperienced people try to remove them with chain saws, and can be very dangerous. Ice damage leaves open wounds that may be a entry point for rot, so it is a good idea to have a professional do corrective pruning to critical healing points like the branch collar.

Some trees may be so damaged that they are not worth keeping. This is particularly true if the tree has brittle wood or a branch structure that makes it vulnerable to future damage in storms. 'Bradford' pear trees are well known for splitting in ice storms and may not be worth saving if they are heavily damaged.

Trees like birch and arborvitae often bend over in ice storms and may never stand up straight again. Sometimes you can tie the branches of a multi-stemmed arborvitae back together with twine and get a few more good years out of it, but I always suggest people plant arborvitaes with a single trunk to avoid this problem in the first place. I have seen people tie birch trees back up, using a stake in the ground or tying it to another tree. This can work, but you should make sure you remove the ties within one year to avoid girdling the tree.

Here is a link to a fact sheet that gives more information on dealing with ice damage to trees:

Build a Rain Garden!

Do you have an area in your yard where rainwater collects for a little while? Is there an area where you could safely divert some of the water coming from impervious surfaces such as your roof or driveway? You might want to consider installing a rain garden.

A rain garden is an attractive small bowl-or saucer- shaped garden planted with water-tolerant native perennial plants that is designed to take advantage of storm water runoff and, while doing so, to keep this extra water from running off into storm drains or streams. This helps protect our waterways from storm water and the pollution it often carries with it. A rain garden helps keep rainfall where it falls, and at the same time can give you a great-looking addition to your landscape.

A rain garden is not a pond. If it's put in the right site and designed properly, it shouldn't become a breeding area for mosquitoes. It is designed to handle water for only a little while, giving the water a little extra time to filter down into the soil. A rain garden could help correct problem areas in many landscapes as well as help protect the environment, and it doesn't have to be one of those enormous, impossible projects.

See if a rain garden might be right for your yard. There are lots of resources listed here:

Changing our way of gardening

I have recently attended meeting on producing "home grown" apples organically (or as near to organically as you can get), and on nematodes. A year ago I attended a symposium on soils. A similar message keeps coming up in these classes.

We're losing chemicals. As this happens we're losing options for pest and disease control in our landscapes. Researchers are coming up with some mighty good replacements at times, but pest control in the landscape is never going to be the same. If we want nice-looking landscapes and home-grown fruit of reasonable quality, we're going to have to change our ways. Here's a list of changes I can think of. Perhaps some of you can add to this list.

1. We're going to have to choose plants differently. Problem-prone plants are going to have to be replaced with plants and varieties that have fewer problems. We already have lots of great choices for landscape plantings. Plant breeding research is progressing. Many times a better plant is already out there, but people didn't know to ask for it because folks tend to request things they've "heard of". We're going to have to do some research to find out if there are better plant choices, and we're going to have to support the businesses that have those plants available for us.

2. Right plant in the right place! We're going to have to research the conditions at the site, and to choose an appropriate plant for those conditions.

3. We're going to have to be sure and plant our choices properly. A healthy plant grows better and is more likely to resist insect and disease problems.

4. We're going to have to be sure the soil is prepared and cared for properly.

5. When a problem develops, we're going to have to identify it correctly and to do research to determine if it is solvable. We need to know what the alternatives are for solving it. We need to know the weaknesses in the insect or disease organism's biology so we can reach the target pest at a susceptible moment using the most appropriate and least hazardous method or methods of control. Oils, soaps, biological agents or chemicals must be applied properly and at the right time, strictly according to instructions.

6. Everybody makes mistakes, and even a back yard can be a pretty complex environment. If a plant continues to give us grief we should give ourselves permission to rip it out and replace it with something that's going to work better in the spot.

Our "Creating Healthy Landscapes" series of information sheets covers many of these topics:

Forget Groundhogs- Watch out for Beavers!

With this post, I'll introduce Kate Brandes, one of our Master Gardeners. Kate is going to be blogging, along with me and Karen for awhile. I have a lot in common with Kate- we both have BS degrees from Penn State and MS degrees from North Carolina State- what are the chances of that? Kate has studied geology, but her current efforts are in environmental issues like watershed protection, and soil conservation.

Here are some thoughts from Kate about a potential "pest" few of us think about!

"If you are considering planting trees on your property and you live near a stream, you may want to consider placing wire cylindrical cages around the base of the trees to prevent beaver damage.I recently learned this the hard way.

I helped the Bushkill Stream Conservancy plant over 600 young trees and shrubs along the Bushkill Creek this past October.We planted four areas along the creek.Two of those areas, Lion’s Park in Forks Township and the Palmer Township Bike path, are located just upstream of Penn Pump Park in an area with lots of road and foot traffic, about a mile from the City of Easton. We planted over 200 native trees and shrubs in these two locations including oaks, viburnums, service berries, dogwood, birches, and witch hazel, among other things.

Some of our project partners went to look at the newly planted trees and shrubs several weeks after the planting, and instead of being impressed with all of our hard work they were instead shocked to see that many of the trees and almost all of the shrubs were missing!As it turns out, a beaver or beavers had taken down about 60 of the newly planted material for winter food stores.

I don’t know about you, but when I think of beavers, I think of remote wooded areas.According to the PA Game Commission, this is not always the case.Beavers operate under cover of darkness, so if they are present in an area, they are rarely seen.During warm weather they eat herbaceous vegetation, but in the fall, they turn to woody vegetation to prepare an underwater food cache of branches.In the area we lost the trees there is no sign of a beaver lodge.I learned from the PA Game Commission that our hungry beaver was likely a bank beaver, which doesn’t build lodges in the stream, but instead makes a hole in the stream bank, where he can’t be seen.Who knew?"

Master Gardeners are volunteers trained by Penn State Extension Horticulture Educators. Once they complete their training, they cooperate with service agencies and community groups on a wide range of gardening projects. Their talents and energies are directed toward providing a link between their community and Penn State Cooperative Extension and Outreach.